Crowley ISD Tech Expo
Saturday, April 16, 2016 10:00 am-11:30 am Bill Johnson CTE Center Crowley ISD students use technology everyday to learn new skills and prepare for their future. The Crowley ISD annual Technology Expo showcases how our students gain college and career skills through the use of technology tools in the classroom. Both students and teachers demonstrate technology use and speak about what they have learned in the classroom and beyond. Whether you and your students/children are presenting at the expo or not you should stop by. It will be fun for all ages. Drive with robots, explore 3D printing, play with augmented reality. You will learn what kids all across the district are learning. This will be an experience everyone can enjoy. When I got my first generation iPad (yes, back in 2010), I started searching for the best free apps to download. One that was highly recommended was TED Talks. More than an app, more than even a website, (www.ted.com) TED Talks is a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing ideas in technology, entertainment, and design. In less than 18 minutes you can hear the world's best thinkers, designers, and innovators describe everything from robotics that can help blind people "see", to homes made of garbage, to the reasons why we should be eating more bugs. If you have never looked at TED Talks here are a few education-related ones to start with. -Michelle Bothel
Who are you when it comes to integrating technology? Are you an early adopter ready to lead and share what you have learned or are you just hanging on?
We all make mistakes. I know, no big news here. What is important is that we learn from those mistakes. Yet, if we see mistakes as the end of the line, as failure, then we don't learn. We just give up. Think about this for students. We think nothing of making up a paper as "wrong" with big red Xs but rarely to we celebrate the failures. After all, wouldn't most of us say that the best teacher is experience. I recently read an article about insecurity in math class. The author explained that by celebrating mistakes as teachable moments and recognizing the process over final answer students can develop more confidence in their mathematical ability.
Isn't that true for us all. If we are afraid to take a chance because we might fail, we will never go anywhere. Think about this the next time you struggle with technology that seems so easy to your students. Or you make a simple mistake in front of the class. We all make mistakes. The question is what are you going to do about it?
One of my favorite videos on risk, failure, and life. Enjoy.
-Michelle Bothel Here is an alternative way to incorporate Bloom's Taxonomy combined with technology in your classroom. TECH (Traditional, Enhanced, Choice, Handoff) complements the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition) model, with Traditional being lower level and with Handoff being a higher level of learning, but with emphasis on students and teachers, and not merely tasks.
- Stacey Dudzinski I heard a quote the other day, "The phone your students are using now will be the most obsolete device they will ever have." Interesting to think about. We work so hard trying to provide students the latest and greatest but the truth is technology moves so fast we can not possibly provide them with the most current technology available. This presents us with a dilemma. We can train teachers to work the newest devices and navigate the most up-to-date software but this cycle is never ending. Professional development on a single program or device is not worth our teachers' time. Instead we should not focus on the tool, but the teaching. How can we affect pedagogy no matter which tool we use? There are hundreds of programs for creating a blended learning course, most with only slight variations. Let's show teachers the fundamentals of what makes an instructionally sound blended class and let them use the help button to find out where the calendar is. What ever 21st century teaching model we are presenting: flipped classroom, online discussions, project based learning, gamification, interdisciplinary learning, etc. we should focus on the pedagogy not the product. The tools change day to day but good teaching practices remain for years to come. -Michelle Bothel Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has been working diligently on a variety of educational technology guides for teachers and educators. The majority of them have been posted here and, thankfully, have received a huge and unprecedented interaction from their readers.
These guides come in very handy for every teacher looking to better integrate technology into his/her teaching. They are very simple,developed in a step-by-step process, illustrated by pictures, diagrams, video tutorials, and examples, and concluded with a webliography containing links to a variety of other websites relevant to the topic under discussion. Pedagogical implications are included in the review of the web tools featured in the guides. These guides are completely free for you to use and all that is asked by Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is that you pay credit to Educational Technology and Mobile Learning if you want to reuse them somewhere else. - Stacey Dudzinski |
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